A Look At British Class With Elegance And Bile

March 2, 2006|Dave Kehr The New York Times and Terry Lawson Detroit Free Press

Class is the great unmentionable of American movies, but the British positively revel in the subject. Seldom has it been treated with more elegance and bile than in Robert Hamer's 1949 Ealing Studios comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, recently issued by Criterion in a two-disc edition ($39.95). Dennis Price has the role of his career as the fiercely self-contained Louis Mazzini, whose aristocratic mother was disowned by her family when she ran off with an Italian opera singer. Vowing to regain the title he believes rightfully his, he polishes his manner into that of a perfect gentleman and sets about eliminating the eight members of the D'Ascoyne family (each and every one of them played by Alec Guinness) who stand between him and the dukedom.

Though Kind Hearts is usually remembered for Guinness' tour de force performances, which include D'Ascoynes of all shapes, ages and sexes, the film is really carried by Price and his female co-stars, Valerie Hobson as the D'Ascoyne widow he has set his sights on and (unforgettably) Joan Greenwood as a silky-voiced, middle-class striver.

The Criterion edition is presented in the picturebox format. On the set's second disc are a 1986 BBC history of Ealing Studios and a 70-minute interview with Guinness shot for a British talk show in 1977.

--Dave Kehr The New York Times

The appeal of Peel

Style was everything in the 1960s British spy satire The Avengers. It starred Patrick Macnee as bowler-hatted secret agent John Steed, and beginning in 1965, when the series was first shown in the United States, Diana Rigg as his partner Emma Peel, whose sartorial preference was form-fitting black leather.

It is fair to say that much of the series' appeal was found in the thoroughly liberated-in-every-way Peel, something now acknowledged in The Avengers: The Complete Emma Peel Megaset Collection ($180), which contains every episode of the show in which Peel faced the state's enemies with her wits, weapons and sexual innuendo.

The 16 discs collect the 51 (now remastered) episodes from the two seasons in which Peel co-starred (the first was in black and white; the second was in color) along with a chapter of the 1977 revival The New Avengers in which Rigg had a cameo. Also here are the three pre-Peel so-called "lost episodes" that were not included on previous collections of the series, broadcast in Britain in 1961-62.

All fans will have their favorite Peel moments and outfits, but special attention should be paid to the memorable "Touch of Brimstone" episode, which is the source of all those fetish photos of Peel in a spiked dog collar that, more than a decade later, became a staple of English punk couture.